The following was written by Phoenix Wolf-Ray ( http://phoenixwolfray.com ) and reprinted here by permission from the author.

The Secret, the Law of Attraction, Conscious Language all involve changing the shape of thoughts through the exercise of will; in other words, thinking differently in order to harness the power of positive thoughts to create a better reality for ourselves. Considerations of what sort of reality we try to create with these thoughts aside, it’s a very good idea, but like many good ideas, there are problems in practice.

In my experience, darker thoughts often spontaneously rise to contradict conscious intent, and this effectively cancels out positive reality-creation potential. Part of me believes while another part sneers in the background, seeing only the shadow cast by the light.

Example: “I love myself. I’m beautiful,” evokes an immediate, hidden, unconscious response: “What a crock. Nobody else loves me. I’m ugly even if I think I’m beautiful.” I can say positively, “Cancel that thought,” or “I release the judgment that nobody loves me and I’m ugly,” which helps, but until I get at the root causes for these thoughts, changes are merely cosmetic.

Becoming aware of the echoes and unconscious reactions to attempts to change and grow is an enlightening process, though changing the pattern of the thoughts isn’t quite as simple and easy as choosing differently, regardless of what ‘they say’.

In my experience and understanding, such rebellious and reactive thoughts simply can’t be controlled, and when we attempt to exert control, we fan the flames of our internal war which is reflected by the external conflicts plaguing the planet. Peace begins within, and is not attained by pouring oil on troubled waters nor through any form of enforced discipline. This is a consensus reality, and until we achieve true (ie, unforced) inner consensus, the majority will rule: so far, the majority of our being is confined to the subconscious.

These parts of self know something that the conscious mind doesn’t, and yes, they are sullen, rebellious, angry and intractable. Why shouldn’t they be? They know exactly how little we trust them, how unwilling we really are to face them, ask them who they are and what they really want. They know us better than we know them, for the divers in the deep can clearly see the swimmers in the light who circle above them, but the light-centric selves are blind to the denizens of the darkness, not to mention uninterested and judgmental.

When we judge some thoughts to be good and others to be bad, rather than exploring all thoughts from source to consequence, we ignore and effectively deny our power. The negative matters, yes, and we do know its potential for destructiveness; that is why we are so earnestly bent on controlling it. But we have no idea what might happen if we truly embrace our negativity and ask it to teach us what it knows.

Thought experiment:

Positive thought: “I am radiant and creative.” Negative response: “I am so full of shit.”

Ask: who said that?
Answer: somebody who knows your secrets.
Ask: what secrets?
Answer: everything, and I mean everything that you don’t like is within you. There’s no escape from your shadow.

Solution seems obvious: embrace and love what you have not liked. Sounds simple, but it’s not easy to pull off. We need to humble ourselves in the face of our dark, angry, hurting, frightened, cynical selves, to accept that just maybe they know something we don’t. We have (the conscious ego) sought knowledge for so long, and attempted to teach, train, condition and control our subconscious minds which seem the source of so much unruliness, chaos and anxiety, but never have we slowed our search down and simply asked our wayward feelings, what do you know that I don’t know?

Answer: everything.
Ask: such as?
Answer: the premises of the reality under which you operate are fundamentally flawed. Erase and start over. Now.

We don’t like to hear that answer, nor do we want to believe it. Still, to pretend it is wrong just because it is inconvenient to believe appears insanely self-destructive. According to the view from below where such things can be seen, the very foundations of reality are cracked and rotten. All attempts to heal it have so far taken the form of concealing the rot, not changing anything in any real way. Like painting over rotting floorboards and covering them with a nice carpet, then acting surprised when the floor caves in.

Somewhere in the basement an alarm bell is clanging and all the positive thinking, profound discipline and learning in Creation will not make it stop. Only stopping what we are doing and letting ourselves feel how scared and angry we really are will do that, or at least open space to feel what to do and where to go next.

When we stop, we can feel the movement of the spheres, we can hear ourselves breathing. When we end the constant stream of mental lectures and instructions directed toward our lesser selves, we can begin to hear their point of view.

Listen: your body knows things that your mind does not. The flow of understanding has to start to move in different grooves, through circulating loops of feedback, and the knowledge can’t source from somebody else’s system, not ever. You have to feel your way through the particular weaving winding multidimensional labyrinth that is your own personal path, and nobody can teach you how.

Your body is your guide and guru, and it is only mind’s egotistical pride that insists on resisting the impulses that come from your physical wisdom. Your body is always right, even when it is wrong. Indulging in your compulsions is the only way to understand them, but you have to do it with attention and intention to understand, not throwing up mind’s hands and surrendering in a huff, saying, “Ok, you get your way, wake me when you need me for inevitable damage control.”

Your body needs you to stay awake and alive no matter what, no matter how it looks or feels, and to seek the self-trust that provides the magic ingredient for alchemization of your experience.

You learn by doing; you will know you are there only when you actually are there. You will be healed of addictions when you no longer crave them, but the path of resistance can never take you to that desired end. You will always desire things that your mind judges to be wrong until your mind stops judging and starts seeking to understand the meaning of what happens while it is happening.

Your mind is blind, deaf and dumb, the victim of the numbing barrage from the collective mental freak-out, the rebellious, reactive shouting of the unconscious masses. Stop listening to them, and start listening to your ownself.

When you crave with blind raging desire to stuff yourself with sweetness, oblivion or altered awareness, don’t fight the craving. Give in consciously and stay self-lovingly aware as you indulge. Taste what you eat, notice how you feel while in altered states, breathe into your experience with curiosity and the will to accept and understand. Break habits of thought and control first, and physical habits will follow when they are really ready. Don’t say grudgingly to yourself, “Alright, but just this once.” Don’t impose conditions. Don’t condescend.

Give in lovingly, compassionately, without superior understanding. Know that you do not know what it means, and accept not knowing. Seek not answers from books, teachers or anyone outside your own body of truth. Ask the Consciousness of the Whole for help and support in your journey. Forgive yourself. Constantly.

Forgive yourself, not for what you do, but for the ways that you judge what you do to be bad, wrong, unhealthy or otherwise unacceptable in your own eyes. Forgive your own conditional love for your sweet self. Forgive your petty criticisms, your assumptions and your arrogance. Accept all of your being, the light and the dark, and listen to all of your thoughts, the positive and the negative. Negative thoughts have a teaching to offer: they let you know that a part of you is unhappy with what you are thinking or doing. This does not mean, cave in blindly to every unhappy voice. It means, give each unhappy voice your loving attention and allow its response to be your own. Own it, in other words, as yourself.

Sample situation: suppose you are at a meditation retreat for the purpose of raising your vibration and becoming a more positive and fulfilled being. You are chanting mantras and doing breath exercises in a group.

You are aware of an unhappy voice in the background of your mind:

“This is bullshit. I hate this.”
Query from consciousness: “What do you hate about it?”
“It’s stupid and annoying.”
“What is stupid about it?”
“Nobody asked me how I felt about doing this. I hate sitting still. I hate repeating rote thoughts as formulas.”
“What can I do, seeing as how we’re here and committed to the experience, to make it better for you?”
“Listen to me. Feel me.”

Then, allow yourself to do it. Feel how much you hate what you are doing, without abandoning your awareness of the other parts of yourself which are enjoying and thriving in the experience. It is you thinking these things, after all. These thoughts tell a truth about how you really feel that you have not noticed because you believed that to feel it would interfere with having a good experience. Allow the goodness to continue and embrace the badness at the same time. You can do it. You are a great being with room for many internal contradictions and a wide variety of experience. Do not ignore your sad hurting selves.

If a baby cries at a party, somebody needs to care for it, yet the party can go on. Your unhappy thoughts are your own babies crying. You are responsible to them, and ignoring them has long-term consequences.

Allow your body to shift in small ways, to shiver, to quiver in indignation at imposed stillness. Inasmuch as you feel safe to do so, allow small sounds. Notice everything about how it feels to be doing this, stretch your awareness to its limit. Exercise your loving attention. Let your attention go toward, not stopping or controlling your negativity, but increasing and expanding your awareness, acceptance and understanding of yourself. Keep yourself safe by allowing your expression to be appropriate in the context of the situation, and love all parts of you.

Be lovingly-intended toward yourself. You deserve it. All of you.

My first awareness of a contract of any kind came to me as a child, in the form of the ubiquitous electronic presence in my life growing up — the TV. “Lost In Space” was one of my favorite shows, and in one memorable episode “The Trader”, a Mephistophelian rogue from another planet bound Dr. Smith to a contract. Smith and the space family Robinson were marooned with little food, and Smith decided in his inimitable self-first way that he was going to trade spaceship fuel for food. Little did he know there was fine print attached to the Trader’s contract which Smith signed by imprinting his hand in the soft-clay surface of a box. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, this contract actually bound Smith not merely for delivery of getaway fuel from the lost planet, but also for his very life and essence. Smith had signed a deal with a devil.

During my first year after moving to B.C. a friend who is a kinesiologist and a psychic gave me my first and only psychic reading. During the reading she spent a long time talking about the intense psychic family contract that I have been bound by at a subconscious level. Such family contracts are not uncommon, and can be incredibly powerful and binding.

The theme of The Contract varies, but all families have them to one extent or another. Also referred to as “unwritten rules”, these contracts vary in strength and enforcement depending on the family. My family’s is quite rigid, strictly enforced, with consequences for those who dare attempt to break it!

Some families are comprised of powerful and talented individuals with huge potential, both realized and latent, but unfortunately that power is often tied up in or bled off by strictured, structured energies that do not allow the co-existence of free choice and a flow of love without strings attached. Much love, personal power and latent greatness is tied up in The Contract itself instead of being manifest in the lives of individuals within the family.

Everybody in a family can feel or describe the presence of The Contract if they tune into it. The individuals within families are obviously all very closely connected psychically as well as physically / genetically, whether there is conscious awareness and acknowledgment of it or not.

Roles in families are played out, unconsciously but inexorably perpetuating The Contract. Some examples of tenets within family contracts are: an unspoken agreement among members of the family to study and work hard, get ahead by finding and keeping an upwardly mobile but traditional job in a company or similar hierarchical organization, save for retirement, become as wealthy as possible, turn the bulk of energy and attention back into the family, sacrifice any personal dreams while having kids who, although allowed to have fun and playtime growing up, must never break the family mold once they become of age, including paying back the family for the sacrifices the family made for them. Self-sacrifice is a hallmark of the classic family contract. Many family contracts call for the current parenting generation to sacrifice for the next generation.

There is usually an “executor” member of the family, a patriarch or matriarch, who models the tenets of The Contract while enforcing their necessity with a heavy hand upon others, either children or siblings. To balance the executor there must be one or more “black sheep” across the generations, the rebel, the iconoclast who attempts to break free of The Contract.

Within the family contract paradigm there are also “law-abiders” who don’t necessarily prosper under or enjoy the rules, but believe they have no choice. The law abiders stay within the bounds of The Contract and make the best of them. Often in this subgroup there is significant unprocessed rage and hurt about their own childhood interaction with and shutdown at the hands of their own version of the family contract. The Contract is subjective to some degree and does morph and shift through and among the generations, as each new family branch gets brought into the psychic mix through marriage or other conjugal arrangement. In order to prevent that old emotion being stirred too close to the surface, the law abiders participate in backing the executor in enforcing the shutdown energy inherent in The Contract, outwardly mirroring the inner shutdown of the individuals involved.

There could also be a fourth subgroup, former “bad kids” who make a few inroads toward breaking The Contract. After some setbacks and consequences directly or indirectly meted out by the executor or law abiders, the “bad kids” fall eventually back into line, neither supporting outright rebellion nor adherence. In some cases this group will deny the existence of The Contract.

The success or failure of the rebel is in direct proportion to the amount of personal power she has relative to the family and the executor. Depending on the executor’s relationship with the rebel and each’s ability to shift and change, at some point the executor must ask himself which is more important, The Contract and its unwritten rules and codes of behaviour or the free will of the rebel and his love for the rebel.

On the other end of the polarity, the rebel must ask herself a similar question: which is more important, my free will or my love for the family? She must be willing to risk this love in order to remain true to herself and her heart’s desire which allows her to break free of the bounds of The Contract.

The Contract needs to be acknowledged, experienced and felt, and finally seen for what it is in order for evolution to occur at all levels of family, such as spiritual families, blood, emotional, and ethnic families and so on. Loving family bonds were never intended to become rules of enforced behavior that hinder a given individual’s free will to choose and act according to how that individual sees fit, with loss of love the price to pay for being true to oneself. A free will action ideally harms none while giving safe triggers. If the rebel makes a free will choice that challenges her family contract, growth and evolution, possibly including some form of death is inevitable.

Most executors have not evolved, for better or for worse, and have gotten stuck in frozen images of “what’s right”. Nobody is unbeholden to their own family contract, whether internal or externally evident. It’s not everyone’s path to rip up The Contract, and there will be a place for “law abiders” in families unless and until a more healed version of this picture emerges.

As rebels break away from The Contract, some executors attempt to artificially create a balance by cutting the rebel out of their heart. When conscious healing has not been involved, the consequence of breaking the family contract has always been, at the very least, a loss of love and estrangement of the rebel from the family. That loss is felt on many sides depending on how many members were intrinsically involved in enforcement or disobedience. The rebel and the executor are sure to be involved in this agreggate love loss.

Law abiders in a family, if they are in contact with the rebel, will often tell her that the executor loves her deep down. Yet that love is no longer accessible to his conscious self. It is denied love, which could be called hate. When the love for his seeming polar opposite within the family is no longer accessible to the executor’s or rebel’s conscious heart and mind, it can indeed morph into hatred. Those executors and rebels who have not deeply explored their emotions on the subject have “gapped away” from the original love for the other that once existed.

When the executor of the family contract excises the rebel from his heart for breaking The Contract, or when the rebel in turn excises the executor, they literally shove the love out of themselves. The love may exist, but out in the dark somewhere, unacknowledged, unowned and unfelt.

A successful rebel voids all contracts, psychic and unspoken, both family and societal ones that enforce compliance or remove love or privileges, and draws in a new family, one that accepts her for who she is and acknowledges her as an evolving, changing being. To get to this point and not recreate the original family scenario complete with acrimony and loss of love, she must feel the feelings and release the judgments that caused her to become originally ensnared in a contract which bound her freedom so tightly.

According to The Contract, the rebel needs to pay back to the executor and/or the family the time and energy that was originally sacrificed “for the children”. When the rebel reneges on her side of that dark, unspoken bargain, the consequences kick in. This pattern continues until The Contract is completely expunged from the rebel’s life. This is done through exploring the depths of the old feelings and releasing the old charge all the way to the bottom of the psyche, to the point where the earliest familial imprints and judgments of how reality is supposed to be at home are changed not only consciously but subconsciously. You will know when subconscious transformation has occurred in this area only when enough time passes in the new family and evolution and joy are on a steady, upward track with no major reversals and loss of love and trust.

Along the way to this full healing, the former rebel can re-establish herself in a new and improved family situation that in some fundamental way “replaces” the original family, unless the original family is also moved to stop following The Contract.

Sometimes our rebel will feel the pull of The Contract, saying “come along now, you must do what’s right”. It can manifest as a feeling of hopelessness and inner powerlessness to resist, sometimes with overwhelming guilt. These feelings have the power to colour her whole day with shades of torpor and dullness, lack of desire to live…”what’s the use”, etc.

Core judgments swim up to the surface of the rebel’s consciousness, and as she releases them, she can feel energetic forms like spiky eggshells cracking off, and pockets of old emotional charge rising to the surface beneath them which she can then vibrate by allowing the sounds they want to make.

There is hell to pay for reneging on The Contract, and the rebel must heal the parts of herself still beholden to that hell. As she processes old feelings and faces her original judgments about how family life just ‘is’, she is in effect ripping and re-ripping up The Contract until it loses the power to control her actions or her life.

In the climactic scene of that “Lost In Space” episode, the barterer from hell shows up to claim his side of the bargain. He holds up The Contract facing Dr. Smith, the hand imprint glowing, and as Smith walks helplessly with his arm and hand outstretched towards the image of his hand imprinted in that contract, John Robinson, our hero, appears on the scene. He blasts The Contract into space dust right out of the trader’s hand with his trusty laser.

Would that it were so easy outside the realms of fiction! Our laser has to take the form of releasing judgments aloud, feeling the feelings that come up when we release those judgments. This allows understanding to seep in and old rejected parts of self to return and fill us in the places where the darkness of ignorance and self-denial had been.

On the macrocosmic level, oppressive governments reflect the unmoving rage inherent in The Contract. It appears to be happening today in the United States, Britain, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Israel and Palestine, and everywhere that there is unrest, a civil rights cutback or civil disobedience. Massive societal change could be precipitated by an overt rendering and popular acknowledgment of the hidden “human family” contract.

Life, and Creation, is holographic. From within the dimension of time and its sequential nature, we humans act out Father’s and Mother’s and Child’s ancient, time before time patterns, until they heal in everybody.

We in our families act out the pattern of Our First Parents, as it has passed down the Family Tree to us. The executor of The Contract is the force of that denied rage, playing the role of the entrenched, angry, wrathful First Testament God that must be appeased, or destruction of everything might just happen. All must live according to His rules and mandates and woe to them that stir the mighty wrath of God by “breaking the law”. So goes The Family Contract, an energy certainly felt by the sensitive.

What is “our truth in the moment”? It can be found in what we perceive, what we do, say feel, believe or think. We have been told as children to “tell the truth, now”, and we’ve taken in many messages since that time that revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is what shapes our character and integrity. I resonate with this to a large extent, while also knowing that honesty and truth-telling is fraught with old pain and damage for many of us.

We have trauma around revealing truth and not being believed; when we have given all we have to give and are met with mistrust and suspicion, it is a grave indicator that we contain large gaps of mistrust of ourselves being reflected by the person facing us. We have trauma around feeling too afraid to reveal key parts of the truth; this unprocessed fear generates its worst nightmare when somehow the withheld information is discovered and the other person responds with feelings of betrayal and hurt. Additionally, we have trauma around the guilt we feel when our truth triggers someone else into their hurt. This guilt within can look like punishment from without; on the personal scale we have been punished for lying, telling partial truths, and for telling the whole truth. On the global scale, withholding or even revealing the truth has resulted in torture, death or perpetuation of crimes against humanity.

The consequence of these seminal scenes in our pasts around giving our truth is that our behaviour can warp when faced with another opportunity to speak our truth to our friends, associates, bosses, families or lovers. Perhaps we find ourselves situated somewhere near the poles of the hiding/spilling continuum, on one end either withholding our truths nearly or totally completely, on the other revealing every low-level detail we can think of regardless of its appropriateness to the situation at hand. Neither polarity offers a balanced response.

Emotional and spiritual process can be vital ahead of time in order to get clear on where to land within this spectrum, and to more accurately align with our own inner sense of what feels right to reveal as opposed to “what we should say”. Judgments such as “they can’t handle the truth” are distorted evaluations predicated on past pain and experience. Releasing any judgments, predictions and projections out loud around what to say and how much or little is right to say can also be extremely helpful in the time prior to approaching someone with our truth.

The payoff of finding a balanced truth to give in each situation is the growth of trust: trust for self, trust for other, and trust for the truth itself. The cultivation of trust is, perhaps obviously, most intrinsically important in long-term relationships, where investing our deepest truth in each moment becomes paramount.

Without knowing how to give our truth, we cannot develop the trust we need in ourselves or in anybody else. Being in our deepest truth can grow with practice, becoming more facile with time and deeds. When we can be true to ourselves first and foremost, thoroughly honest with ourselves at all levels, it can radiate outward into all of our relationships.

Because of chronic and imprinted patterns of denial, we have been cut off from the awareness of the power we have, consciously or subconsciously, to magnetize everything that happens to us. A car crash I was in twenty years ago is certainly nothing I would have consciously chosen to manifest, but at that time my subconscious anger denial was so massive and so in control of what I was manifesting that it needed to draw that huge and dramatic an experience in order to get me off the dime toward a choice to intentionally heal what was buried in my subconscious. I was drawing experiences without knowing that I was.

The more unconscious that denial is for me, the more the experience it draws seems random and the more victimized I feel. Yet, it’s all “self chosen”. My emotional body is my Self as intrinsically as any other part of Self. The backlog of emotional denial I have has a direct effect on how consciously or subconsciously I manifest my reality. The feelings themselves want to directly express, not be hidden away. Expression is their natural state of being – being held quiet is not intrinsic to the nature of human emotions.

These experiences we draw that we cannot explain, we cannot explain because the reasons are buried in the subconscious, where old, denied emotions like rage, terror, and hurt live, apart from conscious awareness. We can only recover this awareness piece by piece by “vibrating” or allowing the trapped emotions to rise and show us, our conscious selves, our minds, what they have been holding and the reasons why. My experiences show me where I am denying, insofar as I don’t understand what they are showing me — they are “reflecting” to me, holding up a mirror, of what I am not currently seeing, as well as whatever portion of it I already do understand.

The entire reason for drawing the new experience is to trigger the held emotion and gain resulting awareness and understanding about why I had a similar, original experience way back in the beginning, in my very first incarnation as a manifested being. Once I gain the fullest, deepest understanding I can get on a particular issue, I no longer have to repeat the same kind of unpleasant experience and can finally move on to more pleasant, evolutionary experiences. I’ll only know for sure that “I’m done” with a given issue when similar types of experiences cease, or cease to trigger me.

Only when we can become fully conscious can we consciously create our lives the way we dream them to be. As long as we have most of magnetic selves trapped in the subconscious, the power to manifest in accordance with conscious desire remains latent. The mirror of our experiences and manifestations shows us unfailingly how far we have to go, and in what direction, if we can begin to learn to understand what they are saying about us, not “the other guy.”

Do you believe everything happens for a reason, or that nothing happens to us by chance? Biological beings are electromagnetic in nature. We have an electric side and a magnetic side. Our electric side is our yang selves, our doing, acting selves, the masculine polarity/left brain/right sides of who we each are regardless of gender. And our yin, receiving, accepting sides are our magnetic sides, the left side/right brain, the feminine. Yin energy has just as much power as yang, but it is an indrawing power. Our feminine sides, our magnetic selves, draw experiences, which explains why we do not live in a random universe.

We draw, or magnetize, exactly what we need to experience in order to grow. And this is why, even if I can’t see it, even if something “justifiably” enrages me, I know I have some responsibility for drawing it to my reality. This is how I “create” my own reality, regardless of whether I like or am conscious of what I have created. I only “choose” my reality consciously insofar as my magnetic/emotional essence is conscious. So often these parts are subconscious due to being chronically denied, but still consist of magnetic emotional essence drawing realities. Here, consciousness is “out of the loop”.

Many of us are so electric in so much of our consciousness that when we haven’t actively executed an action and obtained an obvious result, we tell ourselves we couldn’t have had responsibility. Culturally we are still in the process of learning that magnetic essence draws experiences “out of thin air”. This is how pain is self-created (though never consciously desirable) although most people don’t accept this as a truth. We feel justified in blaming others because when “they do it to me” it’s all “their fault” and none of ours. When in blame, we are righteous victims only. This is a distortion our world has been running on since the beginning. The truth buried in unexpressed, magnetic emotions “underneath” the blame can give us significant clues as to where our responsibility lies. But, in most cases, we can’t access it unless those emotions are vibrated. In order to come to balance in any given conflict, we must first intend to discover what our responsibility is.

Pleasant experiences reflect the accepted, vibrating, conscious parts of self; unpleasant ones reflect the unaccepted, nonvibrating, unconscious parts. When we draw pleasant experiences we feel joy, enthusiasm, passion, etc and hopefully we express those — they are just as important to accept and express as the hard feelings. With unpleasant ones we are likewise called upon to express our true response, be it terror, grief, hurt, rage, etc. When we don’t express our natural emotional response we get a more intense experience than last time. The magnetic essence, just a little more intensely denied and impacted than it was, now needs a stronger experience in order to overcome resistance and trigger itself into life. Living things have a vibration, and dead things don’t. The dead parts of ourselves, judged so long ago to be unacceptable and wrong, can come back to life, but until we undeny them, they sit still in the dark, awaiting acceptance for the treasure they have to offer.

Growth comes from taking risks and making changes. Staying more or less permanently in one’s comfort zone makes it a “coffin zone”. I don’t want parts of me to become so deadened into routines and patterns that nothing ever shifts, as I slide inexorably into various levels of death. I try to keep swinging at something currently out of my reach, in order to continually infuse my life with vitality.

Transformation is possible, but not without major growth at all levels of our being. My path for the past fifteen years been one of constant change. I needed the stability of routines and known courses until I was thirty in order to have a “launching pad”, and to see that the path I walked in those years is no longer my right path. I had to experience what I didn’t want in order to know for sure what I did want. I thank my parents for giving me the gift of a baseline level of stability for those first two-plus decades so that I could build the courage to make many eventual changes, not having burned out on changing constantly in childhood. Parts of me would like more comfort and stability now, but finding the right balance between comfort/stability and change can take time to fully manifest. There is nothing inherently wrong with comfort and stability as long as risky choices and refusal to compromise one’s deepest desires are added to the mix.

Only you can know the changes you need to make. If you desire greater fulfillment you could ask your “deeper” or higher self to bring you visions of what your secret desires are, hidden from your conscious awareness. If you do get visions emanating from your buried desires, I wish for you the courage to reach for and manifest them.

‘Chakra’ is sanskrit for ‘wheel’. We all have seven major energy centers or chakras, vortices or wheels of energy located at key points from the tops of our heads to the bases of our spines. When a vision comes, it may come from one of two directions; descending from your topmost chakra at the crown of your head – or beginning deep in your root chakra and rising up towards your upper chakras. If it “grabs” you, it will pass through your heart chakra, the midpoint, where you will notice whether you love the vision or not. If you do love it, and want to give it life, it will travel on towards the remainder of your chakras to ground and manifest. In the process, it will run smack dab into your judgments and fears of why it can’t happen, couldn’t possibly come true, all the reasons it is not a viable vision for you, etc.

We all have imbalances in various of our chakras. These blocks/imbalances make manifestations come out differently than we envisioned them. The imbalances stem from chronically repressing our emotional responses to various triggers, as well as being physical manifestations of denial such as ongoing addictive behaviours.

You may encounter frustration and fear as well as various other physical and emotional obstacles around making your visions come true, and perhaps find heartbreak that they haven’t happened already. You can allow those feelings to express to the best of your ability and acceptance, so that your beloved visions can manifest in all the ways you originally pictured them. In doing so, you’ll be joining the healing and dealing tide rising on every shore of the planet.

Everybody wants and needs outside support and encouragement to make changes toward a fulfilled life. Fulfillment in this context, despite past associations with the term we might have learned regarding finally arriving somewhere, really means “being on my path in important ways, doing what I came to do.” When movement and change is occurring and flow is happening we are being fulfilled. When we are fulfilling ourselves, we have energy for life. Fulfillment may look like actualizing one’s goals, getting a strong head of steam and progress on creative projects, or making healing breakthroughs from past traumas and patterns that are affecting our present moments. It may look like finding one’s right mate, changing career, attracting greater abundance of (fill in the blank) or moving to another place on the planet to which we’re drawn.

This is hard work, some of the hardest work we’ll ever do. Often when we start to enact changes in our lives, we find ourselves faced with all manner of dissuasion from partners, friends, or family members. Outer resistance such as this reflects inner resistance to change and growth, judgments we’ve bought and internalized as “reality” that tell us we are not able to shift, it’s too hard, too much work, don’t have the time or talent, too much negativity in the space – the litany goes on. Instead of fulfillment of our Selves, we are “self-fulfilling” negative prophecies, and we turn out “right” rather than happy (fulfilled).

In the absence of 100% validating, positive inside and outside support (Word up! Nobody has this), we manifest or encounter psychic and/or physically manifested obstacles, reflecting in exact measure the relative strength of our inner barriers to fulfillment. Instead of moving forward, we can get discouraged, feel “set back”, slow down or stop when we meet these obstacles. The obstacles are inevitable; it’s important to see them as part of the fulfillment path. They already existed inside us before we started changing something. If they weren’t there we would already have manifested our lives in an exact match of our visions and heart’s desires.

How to deal? We need help. Help takes many forms – one is supportive friends, partners and family members who believe in us, encourage our healthy risks, receive or witness us when we vent, offer analysis and solutions when appropriate, and take responsibility for their own stirred emotional responses to what we are trying to do. If this kind of help isn’t organically forthcoming, we need to seek it and ask for it from our support network, or elsewhere. This in itself is a challenge for many people, especially but not limited to men who were raised with do-it-yourself conditioning. The above forms of help are only a brief list of examples; sometimes we need more or different kinds of help. Sometimes the scope of the help we need is a more integrated approach, something more formal and tangible to help us access and stay present on our fulfillment path.

“The guy’s a fierce competitor…hates losing…great to watch him play.” Sound like the description of any athletes you’ve read about or known? The competitive drive, while well and good in the structured, rules-centric arena of sports events, is not so welcome between friends, family members, co-workers and lovers. “Competition is good, but NIMBY (not in my back yard).”

The drive to come out on top, to be right, to sell the most widgets, or to have the best spot is one we all struggle with sometimes. Some of us deny that we have such a drive, always giving over to somebody else who wants what we want. Others, talented and experienced at competing and quicker than most, take everything they can every chance they get, trumpeting “I got here first, to the winner gets the spoils”. We want to be right so we can feel good about ourselves; we tell ourselves we like to debate or are good at winning arguments. We also want to be right so we can avoid feeling wrong, which deep inside can equate to feeling bad about ourselves, unworthy, and even endangered. “If I’m wrong, what will happen to me?”

Some of the most beautiful epiphanies in life are when we can admit to one we were competing with that we made a mistake or were out of line, without making ourselves wrong for having done so. Humble moments following the heat of battle (either subtle or overt) are paradoxically moments of great strength and love.

Looking under the hood, we see several root beliefs and imprints causing us to repeatedly and habitually dip into the chaotic waters of competition. The scarcity judgment many hold is a big issue. “There isn’t enough, so I better go get mine now before s/he does”. People with a sense of entitlement are oft-admired and yet this sense can come by having competed ruthlessly and won, then forgetting having done so; or worse, justifying past heartless competitive behaviour by blaming, belittling or finding fault with the vanquished in some way. These are folks who as children or young adults were never taught limits or boundaries around overriding others to get what they want. Or, they had things given to them without being taught the need to appreciate what abundance is and from whence it comes.

Every strong feeling in the book gets stirred by competing, whether we like competing or not. In order to balance the reality of living in a competitive world we have to come to terms with these feelings and express them by the fullest means at our disposal. The cost of denying how we really feel about competing and why we compete or don’t compete and what drives all of it is that history will be doomed to repeat itself until we end the denial of our feelings. Ultimately, we need to reveal these feelings to God or Earth Mother or Great Spirit, whomever we each call Deity. We need to show how we really feel about why we so desperately need to be right all the time or why we don’t have enough love or money or resources, about “living in a dog eat dog world”. Are we enraged at Him/Her/The Universe for not bringing enough? We need get real. At that point, we can start to gain understanding about how we can come to balance with these heavy issues.

Sexual interaction isn’t only for pleasure and union, it is also a crucible for the deepest and most needful healing and dealing possible. What happens when we find ourselves partnered with a survivor of sexual abuse? Having been in that role myself, I find that the pattern seems to be that the preponderence of pleasure and true union eventually gives way to much time spent in the crucible. (For readability’s sake, I’m going to use feminine pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’ to indicate the survivor, and ‘he’ and ‘his’ for the partner, with an understanding that in many couples the genders are reversed or the same.)

There are some key points for partners of survivors to take in deeply. First is that the survivor has been violated in the deepest point in her being, often more than once, and is likely at some point during any given sexual interaction to be triggered into a physical or emotional memory, even if she has already done a lot of recovery work. Because sexual violation touches the core of the individual, the recovery can last a lifetime.This reality does not preclude loving and joyful sex, but can include indefinitely ongoing triggers that arise across time.

Secondly, the partner’s natural sexual desire can also serve as a memory trigger in and of itself for the survivor. Survivors are hypersensitive to the slightest presence of sexual need or hunger in anyone coming on to them. In the right circumstances, this is no problem, but any hesistancy at all on the part of the survivor as to whether to engage can possibly result in her partner “wearing the face” of her abuser, in an emotional or visceral sense.

The most important word for the survivor and her partner is ‘no’. For the most healing result, the partner of a survivor needs to back off sexual advance or interaction immediately upon hearing the word or even the intimation that the original reception to sex has shifted for the survivor. Anything else, such as her partner’s ignoring or negotiating with the survivor’s desire to stop, or his delaying stoppage, results in a reconditioning of the old wound.

The upside of the partner’s impeccability is that the destroyed trust in the core wound of the survivor can rebuild more quickly if she can learn to trust that her ‘no’ has power. This is a necessary stage towards complete recovery for the survivor so that loving and fulfilling sexuality can manifest as the norm. The partner can help the survivor, and in turn, himself by assisting the potential of this manifestation with such impeccability.

Equally important for the partner is his ability to safely and appropriately express feelings of angry frustration, grief, hurt or terror and judgments that “it will always be like this”, “I don’t think I can stand being thwarted like this forever”, etc. It can be terrifying for the survivor to experience her partner expressing or even having such feelings, but is often quite necessary for healing to occur on both sides of the equation. It is crucial that the emotions here are handled responsibly, which is most often a difficult task.

Closing the sexual gap between lovers means expressing and being honest and upfront with feelings on both sides, no matter what those feelings involve. Because of the depth of the issue at hand, this process can be akin to handling dynamite or nuclear waste safely, yet it must be done, no matter how many missteps, for overall evolution to occur in this most sensitive of relational arenas.

   A wonderful organization of wise and loving people in Northern California called the Human Awareness Institute taught me a formula for interpersonal manifestation that I am still working on fully implementing in my life since I first heard it over ten years ago. They outline three steps reflecting Mick Jagger’s punchline to this article’s title: trying sometimes gets what you need.

1) Ask for 100% of what you want, 100% of the time;

2) Be willing to hear ‘no’

3) Negotiate for a win-win.

   Still, in my exploration of this map to fulfillment, I’ve found there are steps that aren’t apparent amidst its surface simplicity.

         Step 0) Take the time to discover exactly what you want. Does the person you are approaching have what you really want? We’ve all got significant inherent power and magic to manifest, but we often manifest what we think we want that turns out to not be what we really wanted. We haven’t taken the time to get to know our desire of the moment. We feel an impulse arise, and then some other part of us instantly interprets what that is, and another part is off and running to get it. Whoa, Nelly!

          Step 0a) Beware of what you don’t want. How many times does our wish begin like this: “I don’t want…” This kind of negative wish can be made to someone else or simply to the universe. What we’re really saying is, “I fear this thing happening,”, which is powered by an underlying judgment, “If it happens it will be bad and I won’t like it.” Creating from unexamined or unprocessed fear and judgments that are underneath every “I don’t want” can give us what we fear. If we process the fear and release the judgments involved, we can discover what it is we’re really afraid of. Noticing that there’s always an “I want” behind the old “I don’t want”, and then asking for what we want can then put us back on track to manifesting positively and in accordance with true desire.

     Step 0b) Process as many feelings as possible around having what you want (e.g. worthiness issues, judgments against the possibility of success, fear of asking). A successful manifestation of truest desire has the greatest possibility of occurring if emotional triggers can be allowed and expressed ahead of time.

     Step 1a) Ask directly. Notice that it always feels better when you yourself are asked directly for something; there is no feeling of undercurrent expectations or subtle manipulation. Example of indirect approach: “I’ve been thinking I don’t want to go alone to the dance.” Direct: “Would you go to the dance with me?”

Step 1b) Find/process your rage, fear and hurt around the possibility of ‘no’. Fear of hearing ‘no’ can result in indirect asking, not asking, or asking for less than 100% of what you really want. This is a key in the original three-step formula. If you aren’t willing to hear ‘no’, it’s probably wrong time for asking at all, and more process time is required first.

Step 3a) Process feelings if a win-win cannot be found at the end of negotiation. If a win-win cannot be found, how can you get what you need? Feel the core of your need deeply, express all the feelings you can, then stay aware for new information from without or within. Find willingness to hang out in the uncertainty of unrequited desire, holding a line of faith that something will shift the situation toward getting your deepest needs met. “But if you cry sometimes/you might find…”

Within nearly every adult human lies the ability to bond and join with another adult at the deepest possible levels through sexual union. It is this ideal that keeps many of us searching for the perfect coupling to bring us the bliss we have heard about, that we dream is possible, and that we even fleetingly achieved one time, one night, years ago with somebody who isn’t even around anymore. True magic and power, the ultimate creative rocket fuel, is inherent in our sexuality, but in most of us it sure doesn’t feel that way. Some of us feel sexually depressed, asexual, ho-hum or downright averse to sexual interaction. On the other end of the continuum lie those of us intensively driven to attain this bliss, scrambling past one lacklustre or okayish orgasm after another in a desperate urge to finally find it, never stopping to feel the emotional backlog accrued along the way.

Two main patterns (with variations) of adult sexual wounding can be isolated. Firstly, having sex when we don’t really feel like it, caving to either internal or external pressure. Or, moving too rapidly into sex and, once engaged, towards orgasm. “Too rapidly” means suppressing feelings of wanting to take one’s time, or succumbing to old habits of impatience or need for the orgasmic jolt (different from the oneness of union alluded to earlier).

The main agents of wounding involved here are sexual guilt (“I’ve been saying no a lot, I should give my partner a ‘yes’ this time”, or “I don’t want to hurt him/her”), sexual terror (“I don’t DARE say no again”, or “I’m afraid to slow him/her down, I’m afraid of their anger, I’m afraid of the backlash”), and sexual rage (“aren’t you finished YET?!”, or “c’mon c’mon it’s going to be so good, let’s keep GOING…what’s wrong?! What do you mean, you want to stop?”, or bodily pounding, acting out a desire to dominate, etc). Though by no means an exclusive listing, these are some of the words associated with emotions that arise from a lack of inner and inter alignment with acting on sexual feelings.

To create space for oneness, we must clear out what keeps us divided from ourselves and each other. We can’t just go directly to feeling sexually patient by deciding so; we must really be there. When triggered before, during, or after sex, feeling and expressing these old, formerly-denied feelings can help, in all the ways previously described in this space. If you can dare to stop and feel, notice how hard it is to stop! This is how strong our sexual imprinting is. It’s right to want and pursue yummy sexual feelings, but the backlog must be addressed whenever stirred, else the yummies get achieved with a potentially harsh price that will be collected on sooner or later.

If your partner needs to cry during or after sex, encourage that; this clearing is absolutely necessary and in most cases does not reflect how well you “performed”. These tears probably have nothing to do with you, other than the help you gave your partner with your very presence so s/he could open deeply enough to fully feel him or herself. Also, the more deliberately we can engage our sexuality, the more likely it is that we will feel ourselves fully as we go along, and not deny our feelings. Sexual interaction isn’t only for pleasure and union, it is also a crucible for the deepest and most needful healing and dealing possible.

There is very little in the world that brings a parent’s triggers to the surface as quickly as the tears or loud, angry expressions of their child. Consider that much of what is seen to be your child’s emotional expression may not be theirs at all. It may be yours, the parent’s, refracted through the “lens” of your child’s emotional body.

When I was young my father was convinced that I was doing or saying certain things or expressing in certain ways deliberately, just to upset him. I never was, but whatever it was at those moments that I was expressing or enacting never failed to trigger him with pinpoint accuracy, as if I was doing it intentionally. None of this was conscious for me, because I was always shocked when he reacted that way. I was “just being a kid”; in other words, acting instinctively and impulsively most of the time. A certain dynamic was apparent; I was either acting out or expressing the very feelings he wanted to avoid.

Children are little emotional sponges, exponentially moreso than the most sensitive adult empath. Because of genetic and karmic linkups with the parents, they absorb, act out and reflect the very feelings we as parents have literally shoved out of ourselves, whether consciously or not, or recently or not. Imagine these denied feelings as splinters energetically entering the auric field of a psychically open child. Like physical splinters, these feelings must work their way out again, so that their rightful owners can experience and take responsibility for them in one way or another. Unfortunately it does not always work that way, as children are often controlled out of these natural expulsions and forced to continue to try to hold these feelings.

When emotions rightfully belong to the child, it is somewhat simpler. It still behooves the parents to teach appropriate expression of feelings, such as helping children re-member the difference between acting out and expressing safely in sound and body movements without hurting themselves or anything/anybody else (I say “remember” because children as babies and toddlers were naturally appropriate expressors before societal and subtle pressures caused their pure expression to warp into act-out behaviours). In these cases, if there aren’t generalized parental rules against expression, then compassion, guidance and allowance can enter and the child can offload safely and effectively. A parent can easily tell the difference as to whose emotions the child is expressing/acting out by whether s/he is triggered by their child’s display of them.

In a related article I outlined several keys for parents who are triggered by their child’s actions and expressions. The more completely a parent can take responsibility for the feelings that come up for them in response to their child’s feelings, especially if the parent can express these feelings him or herself shortly following the trigger, the more dramatically the child’s behaviour can shift. I watched this happen often with my own son – when he triggered me and I was able to express my response fully in my own emotional body, he would either no longer trigger me that way with similar future behaviour or would simply cease that behaviour. Pretty magical, yet simple when the dynamic is accepted and applied.

Emotional expression, reflections, and strong emotional triggers can be enormously complex and confusing, especially in the midst of an unfolding issue. I welcome questions, requests, feedback, and debate around any of the topics raised in these articles. With permission, confidential questions could be used as take-off points for future articles.

“As without, so within”. Imagine a whole universe inside us. What does that really mean, and how can that awareness help us heal? Aren’t we just organic tissue and fluids inside?

Assuming that there are more realms of existence than the physical, everything we know to exist outside ourselves exists at some level of our inner being. Everything we participate with outside us, we participate with inside, and it follows that everything that happens to us experientially is going on inside us already, perhaps at the subconscious levels of existence. That 90% of “unused” brain has to have some function!

If there is a reason for everything that happens to me, and if I create my own reality, then there are no such things as accidents, coincidences, and “luck”. The power of my amazing brain draws to me the precise experiences I need in order to learn and evolve, and draws the experiences I need to release the latent personal power trapped there in my subconscious.

Let’s say somebody hits me after shouting at me and threatening me. I have somehow brought this on myself, because, well, I create everything in my own reality. Sounds good, but it feels bad. Why? Because there is more to the picture than that. Yes, I have a dynamic inside me, that is indeed drawing this “reflection” of my inner turmoil. But it takes at least two to create an interpersonal incident. My abuser is the active party in the incident, and he has responsibility for the action he has taken. But I too have responsibility for drawing an exact, energetic match to the unreleased rage and terror trapped within my subconscious, in a state of denial. Because this energy is denied, it is not conscious. Because it is not conscious, it is not controllable, but emotional energy is magnetic and draws to itself the exact experience necessary to bring release. If someone’s hitting me, I have an equivalent energetic charge inside me that matches the outer reflection in precise proportion. I need these reflections to learn about what I am holding, and why I am holding it, so I can release it instead of continuing to deny it inside me.

The most effective way I have found to draw more pleasant experiences is to safely release emotions, either with myself or a trusted healing partner. I do this by expressing the emotions in sound, without hurting myself or anyone else. I use pillows to beat, scream or cry into. I allow fear to express in keening wails or simply allowing my jaw to chatter. If it doesn’t feel right or possible for you, ask your guides or God to put this emotional essence in its right place, feeling as much passion as you can when you call for this. Release judgments out loud about the situations you experience.

We can ameliorate the “negative intensity” of our experiences if we are proactive about our emotional state and what we have denied since we were little children. Emotional expression is power, and if we deny our power, it will “reflect” outside ourselves as power in a state of denial working against us. Taking responsibility in this context means feeling deeply into what our experiences say about what we have been holding onto and ignoring for a very long time, and doing something about it. That might simply be feeling what we feel. When we can be mindful of this, then we can watch our reflections shift to more of what we like and less of what we don’t.

Healing within the context of a relationship is maybe the hardest piece of the work we could ever do. So many of us want a good, solid, committed, yummy relationship, but the road to a time-tested, work- in-progress pairing is littered with casualties. We seem to make the same mistakes, and get drawn into the same patterns of behavior, reactivity, and reversal so often that it’s amazing that we keep pursuing relationship.

How does it come to this? After all, it’s so incredible in the beginning for most of us; the famous “honeymoon phase”. Why can’t it be like that forever? This part of any relationship marks the halcyon days often used as a yardstick against fearful, guilty, angry and sad realities that precipitate into being as many a relationship wears on. It’s not necessarily that we are projecting perfection in the beginning, overlooking all the bad stuff, although that may be present too. It’s just that in the very beginning, we haven’t hit the gap yet.

And what is the gap, you might ask? As we ascend to the heights of the honeymoon stage, we also cut deeper, in exact measure. We grow in all ways within a relationship, separately and together; the energy literally gets bigger. This energy pushes on all the unhealed places within ourselves and our partner, and “the gap” is the container for all of what we had previously pushed away. The gap is another word for splits or holes in our energy field, and into those subconscious gaps go everything we haven’t dealt with or integrated into our conscious acceptance. The gap is always lurking within us, until we are completely healed, and it can’t be avoided when growing interpersonal connections reach a critical mass. The gap is within us as individuals and between us as couples.

Different people handle hitting the gap in different ways. Some of us act out, engaging in addictive behaviours of escape. Some of us resort to blaming our partner as a way out of taking responsibility for our part. At our best, we can learn to recognize and apply the understanding that our partner is our mirror, showing us something we cannot yet see or accept about ourselves, and we seek in our healing intent amidst the emotional turmoil to find our role or responsibility in the situation.

When I feel victimized, I need to ask myself, what subconscious or gapped part of me is drawing this reflection to the light of day? Our gapped energies draw situations to ourselves that can be triggers for balancing those energies. One of the hardest aspects of a given gap between lovers is recognizing the interlocking and meshing patterns that are enacted between the two. They are often complex and disguised, completely non-obvious, especially when strong feelings are being stirred into life. I prefer to feel, and express, whatever it is I feel, in a safe and responsible way, and then look at what my role is – because most often the understanding isn’t available until after the emotions stirred are resolved. If I try to figure it out either in my own brain first or in charged dialogue with my partner during the emotional activation phase of the gap, I don’t get very far.

Why do we keep going toward finding functional relationship? Perhaps it is the potential of self-awareness and the desire to apply it, live it, and return to a deeper phase of the honeymoon stage, to match the original dreams and visions of a match made in the heaven of our hearts.